If there’s one thing I’ve noticed since the launch of the iPhone, it’s how few phone companies have been prepared to take on the iPhone at its game. All the iPhone “killers” out there from the major phone companies are really nothing of the sort – they’re just touchscreen phones that pretend they’re iPhone competitors, but they don’t really go for the throat.

Before you start protesting and throwing examples of your favourite phone at me as a demonstration of how wrong I am, Sony have very kindly come up with all the proof I need – and it’s not even a phone!

Meet the Sony X-Series

At CES 2009 last week, Sony launched the new Sony X-Series, a glorious device with a touchscreen user interface every bit as good as the iPhone’s. Indeed, it may even be better, for while the Sony device also comes with advanced features such as a CoverFlow-like system for browsing though your albums, it does all this through a much superior 3″ OLED display.

Yes, the Sony X-Series is currently the closest thing to the iPhone that you’ll find on the market (or at least you will, when it goes on sale in the summer of 2009). Problem is, the X-Series isn’t a phone, it’s a Walkman!

This is odd. If Sony can design a user interface very bit as good as the iPhone’s, and then create a Walkman to directly challenge the fearsome iPod Touch, why can’t Sony Ericsson develop a phone to take on the iPhone using the same interface?

Come to that, why has every other phone manufacturer shied away from competing head on with Apple? Even Nokia have wimped out. Their latest touchscreen phone, the Nokia N97, is designed as a phone that’s primarily a Web-browsing device, not an all round media playing-cum Web browsing device that the iPhone is. Their previous touchscreen phone, the Nokia 5800, was a music phone, with no intention of browsing the Web.

No phone manufacturer, it seems, has come up with a phone that is designed to take on the iPhone at its own game in its entirety. Either the interface just isn’t there, or the phone has been hobbled to take on part of the iPhone’s functionality, but not all of it.

Why? These companies have the technical prowess to do this. What are they afraid of?

Beats me! But while the big 5 phone companies sit on their ass and pretend the iPhone doesn’t exist, there’s a fantastic opportunity here for an unknown Android developer to put together a phone with a cracking set of features that beats everything the iPhone can do, and add their own bells and whistles to Android to outshine every other smartphone on the market today.

[Source: MediaMentalism]